Tuxedo

Diverting from their respective day jobs, the pair released their debut LP back in March. It’s clear from the outset that Tuxedo was designed to make you dance.

The duo will tour Oz for the first time this month. While the album is jammed full of impressive originals, their stage shows are labelled ‘Disco DJ Sets’. “It’s a combination of everything,” says One. “We’ll play maybe four or five Tuxedo records, we’ll play a tonne of unreleased remixes we did, new Tuxedo songs. Mayer will sing a couple of hits.”

“It’s more of a sing-along,” says Hawthorne. “But then there’s a live performance. We’re DJs – we both were DJs before we even started this whole thing, so that’s what we do.”

“It’s cool as a DJ when your songs are the biggest songs of the night,” adds One. “You’re playing everybody else’s music and then yours comes on and everybody goes crazy. That’s always fun.”

A collaboration between the pair has been on the cards for nearly a decade, after they discovered a shared interest in ’80s boogie-funk music. But even once they started working on tracks, neither of them thought Tuxedo would become a fully-fledged project.

“For me, it was a break from rap,” says One. “I was doing so much hip hop that just even listening to these up-tempo records, it was so much different than the beats I was making. So I made a couple of mixtapes, just fuckin’ around. It was just a different kind of outlet.”

“I definitely was not thinking about that at all, until Jake sent me some tracks,” says Hawthorne. “I was just blown away by how authentic it was, how good he was doing it. Even up until a couple months before we released the album, it was still just a thing we were doing just purely for our own amusement so that we could ride around and listen to it.”

Jake One came to prominence as a member of the G-Unit production team, and in recent years has worked with Brother Ali, Wale and Drake. A gifted multi-instrumentalist, Hawthorne first grabbed attention in 2009 with the ’60s-mining debut A Strange Arrangement, and has issued two further solo records since. But despite reaping critical acclaim for their work in hip hop and soul, Tuxedo was specifically conceived to inhabit the realm of funk.

“I just made a concerted effort to first of all make it fast,” says One. “Most of my rap beats are in the mid-80s or 70s [beats per minute]. So to go up to 110 BPM, what you’re playing note-wise is probably going to be a little less active, cause it’s faster. Those first ones I did, they were dope, but they didn’t really have the changes I probably should’ve had, and bridges. I just didn’t know how to do all that stuff. I’m still approaching it from a rap perspective at that point.

“The hip hop aesthetic is to make the best four bars possible and not worry about the intro, outro, pre-chorus and all that,” he continues. “It just has to hit when it first drops. That’s what I’m primarily good at, so Mayer comes up and puts [on] some of the other little aesthetics and makes it a little more song-friendly.”

“I maybe add some more finesse,” Hawthorne says. “But it was really like, neither one of us wanted to just redo the records that we already knew. We wanted to come up with something different. Some of the early demos were a lot closer to the stuff we were trying to emulate. Once we figured out that wasn’t working as well for us, that we should be ourselves, I think that’s when it really clicked.”

Hawthorne and One were partly motivated to form Tuxedo after noticing a lack of contemporary music that authentically reawakened the late-’70s/’80s post-disco boogie sound.

“At the time when we first started making this stuff, back in ’06-’07, there was nothing like it anywhere in popular music,” says Hawthorne. “Then we started hearing songs like [Daft Punk’s] ‘Get Lucky’ or Bruno Mars’ ‘Treasure’ and then we realised, ‘Maybe everybody else is ready for this now.’ But it was kind of a kick in the ass for us, because we had been sitting on 20 songs like that. We were just doing it for ourselves, because there was nothing like that available for us to buy.”

Indeed, tapping into the zeitgeist might’ve been the last thing they expected to do, but Tuxedo joins records such as Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, Mark Ronson’s Uptown Special, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Multi-Love and Miami Horror’s All Possible Futures as a contemporary torchbearer for electronically inscribed funk. The album proves it’s a creatively fruitful collaboration, and they’ve every intention to keep Tuxedo alive.

“We’re already halfway into the next one,” says Hawthorne. “It took us a while to figure out what Tuxedo really should be. Then, once we got it, towards the end of the first album, then it just kicked into overdrive. Now we’re coming up with songs every day.”